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News - An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

In short, older, larger colonies grow up to act more wisely than younger smaller ones, even though the older colony does not have older, wiser ants.

Just a quick note, this is not necessarily true and depends very much on the species, Workers of Camponotus ligniperda for example have been proven to be able to reach an age of up to THIRTEEN YEARS (most of them probably only live for 2-5 years on average but that's still some really old ants), even workers of Lasius niger can live for almost 7 years.

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Also even Bacteria can do something similar although they probably do it by different means (they change their genetic algorythms so that for example their offspring preemptively produces countermeasures to a substance only their "parents" have encountered).

Edited by Serafine, December 12 2018 - 12:52 AM.

We should respect all forms of consciousness. The body is just a vessel, a mere hull.

I think it's interesting that they also choose to use Harvester ants as an example for "having memory," since harvesters rely on their patrollers to look for food, and then once they go back into the nest, foragers come out to follow the trails. Deborah Gordon, the author of this article also said in her book that harvester ants actually change and vary their foraging area a lot, due to the numbers of seeds in the area. Harvesters don't usually automatically return to previous foraging areas which had an abundance of seeds the day before, they have to create new trails usually pretty much every day.